YMMV / South Park S10 E1 "The Return of Chef"

• Angst Aversion: Many fans have found this episode quite hard to watch, with Chef getting Killed Off for Real in the most brutal way possible and the serious nature behind the Super Adventure Club.
• Anvilicious: The message regarding the barely concealed Scientology metaphor of the Super Adventure Club is even blunter than their previous episode on the subject. The "Super Adventure Club" is a fruity club that ruined a "fun guy" and their beliefs are far more absurd and preposterous than the other major religions. Unlike Mormonism and other religions, Stone and Parker make it clear that they see nothing redeeming or of value that the "Super Adventure Club" brings.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: "You know what you call a Jewish woman's boobs? Jewbs."
• Broken Base:
  • While the episode got good reviews, many considered it too dark for its own good, most notably how brutal Chef's death was. On the other hand, the comedic moments, the brutal jabs at the very controversial Church of Scientology and Kyle's genuinely heartfelt eulogy at the end rescued the episode for some.
  • The death itself is also quite polarizing. Due to how the sheer nastiness and goriness of it, as well as the the fact that the character's last decision before being killed was to leave the boys in favor of the cult that had brainwashed him, it came across to many fans as very disrespectful to both the character and Isaac Hayes. However, others believe that a Cruel and Unusual Undignified Death is an appropriate send-off for a major character in a show like South Park, especially considering how many of those deaths one of the main protagonists gets daily, and the fact that many other major retired characters got killed in similarly gory and undignified ways, such as Ms. Chokesondik, Ms. Crabtree, Pip Pirrip, Betsy Donovan, Jack Tenorman, Satan, Jason White, and Mrs. Nelson^note  granted, even those are quite contested among the fandom .
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Chef getting horrifically killed is quite tragic, but it's still hard not to laugh when his corpse starts shitting itself.
  • The investigator licking the crotch of the doll in front of the children and Butters exclaiming "My Uncle Bud did that to me once!" would not be funny in any show but South Park.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Because Chef was such a well-loved character, many fans prefer to ignore this episode's existence for obvious reasons. Not helped by how needlessly brutal and disturbing Chef's death is.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • According to Isaac Hayes' son, Chef's "fruity little club" literally brainwashing and ruining "a cool guy" wasn't that much of an exaggeration. As it turned out, Hayes never intended to quit South Park in protest of "Trapped in the Closet", rather the Church took advantage of the fact that he'd just had a debilitating stroke and, in his absence, quit for him (not unlike what they'd done with Lisa McPherson)! "Trapped in the Closet" may have exposed what Scientologists actually believe, but this episode ended up (unintentionally) exposing what they do.
  • Chef dying only to be resurrected as a willing member of the Super Adventure Club mirrors Hayes dying without ever renouncing Scientology.
  • A visibly uncomfortable Mr. Mackey watching Detective Jarvis interrogate the fourth graders on Chef's possible pedophilia and asking them if the latter touched them in certain ways using a doll can be this because seasons later in "Insheeption", it's revealed that he was molested by a man in a Woodsey Owl costume as a child.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The choppy splicing of Chef's previous lines to form new dialogue would later become a popular editing technique in YouTube Poop.
• Memetic Mutation
  • "And for dessert, how would you children like to suck on my chocolate salty balls?"
  • Referring to Scientology as a "fruity little club."
• Moral Event Horizon: Connelly crosses it when he kidnaps Chef to turn him into a pedophile, again, and finally succeeds.
• Nausea Fuel: Chef's demise, with him getting impaled, flayed, and severed. And then shitting himself.
• Nightmare Fuel: Chef's drawn out death. First, he starts burning alive while barely hanging on the broken rope bridge after lightning strikes it. Then he gets hit by falling debris and falls on to several rocks before being impaled by a dead tree. Afterwards, a mountain lion and a grizzly bear show up to literally tear Chef apart with his internal organs spilling out, and the mountain lion tears his face off; also, one of the SAC members accidentally shoots Chef several times while trying to kill the mountain lion.

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